Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, December 12, 1995

For five decades, the elite Moscow college that all Russians know by its acronym, MGIMO, was the cradle of the nomenklatura, the Soviet ruling class.

The faculty was drawn from the top ranks of government and the KGB, the students from the cream of the educa- tional crop. The visiting speakers who courted them included presidents and prime ministers from five continents.

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In two days of conversation with MGIMO's most accomplished students, a reporter found brilliant minds at every turn -- but dire anxiety about the nation's future and deep cynicism about its current politics.

"The problem with our political parties is that I don't believe in a single one of them," says Grig- ory Falin, 26. "All of the leaders are motivated by the same thing: their own self-interest, and nothing more."

As Sunday's parliamentary elections near, most students were not sure whom they would vote for, or whether they would vote at all.

Among those who had decided, only a small percentage said they support the reformers promising to accelerate Russia's drive toward democracy and capitalism.

"You can't change this world -- that has become very clear -- no matter how activist you are," says Vladimir Legoida, 21, who spends most of his evenings preparing to be a missionary of the Russian Orthodox Church.

"It's better just to trust in God and concentrate on the next world," he says.

This world was turned upside down eight years ago, when
Mikhail Gorbachev
started the revolution that toppled the Soviet Union in 1991. Most of today's MGIMO students were teenagers then, already identified as high achievers and tracked into the network of special schools that once guaranteed a lifetime of power and economic privilege.

MGIMO was the pinnacle of that system. Situated in southwest Moscow on a sprawling, neatly landscaped campus with imposing white granite buildings, the institute offers programs that equal or surpass the best in comparable Western European and U.S. universities.

Its 4,000 students are taught by a faculty of more than 800, in courses that cover the foreign affairs gamut from international law to global economic theory. Instruction is offered in 50 languages at MGIMO, and its graduating seniors speak arcane dialects with the inflections and idioms of the native-born.

What changed, after Gorbachev's perestroika and Russia's leap into the free market, is that the air of unquestioned privilege -- and the lifetime guarantees -- evaporated.

Strapped for cash, the government has kept faculty salaries and student aid at Soviet-era levels, while the ruble has plunged and prices have soared. Professors at MGIMO now make the equivalent of $100 per month, less than the well-organized Russian transport union has won for the drivers of Moscow buses.

The average monthly student subsidy for food and supplies is roughly $5 -- enough for one meal a week in the university cafeteria.

More troubling, the certainty of a powerful job after graduation has foundered on severe budget cutbacks in the civil service.

"The state has abandoned the nation's young generation," declared a joint appeal from political leaders in central Russia in November. Their statement noted that "more than 500,000 (college) graduates are swelling the ranks of Russia's unemployed each year."

One result, says MGIMO senior Sergei Vareykin, is that "many students think they made a terrible mistake in coming here -- that they would have been a lot better off leaving school and going into some sort of business, where there was a more comfortable future in store for them."

Vareykin, 20, is the editor in chief of the Internationalist, a bi-monthly student newspaper whose evolution in recent years speaks volumes about the changing mood at an institution that was traditionally a pillar of the establishment.

As recently as 1992, Vareykin says, "our pages were filled with photographs of MGIMO administrators, greeting visiting VIPs like George Bush or Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and all of our articles had to be approved by the university rector."

Now the students themselves control the Internationalist, and the content has been altered beyond recognition.

In April, Vareykin's team put together an entire issue on the inner workings -- and political struggles -- in Soviet intelligence circles, gleaned from extensive interviews with former KGB officers on the institute staff.

It was a subject that yesterday's MGIMO students, many of whom were themselves headed for the KGB, would have relegated only to private conversations with trusted friends -- not simply because such thoughts were subversive, but because they once jeopardized a golden future.

As the winter set in, thousands of students from MGIMO and other universities braved the subzero Moscow temperatures to wait in line for tickets at the
Theater of the Moon
, a new avant-garde playhouse in the city center.

The attraction was "Robinson Crusoe 1995," an updated version of the classic castaway tale, featuring a disaffected Russian who flees to a remote island populated only by parrots.

Determined to live like the apparently untroubled birds, the Russian Crusoe instead learns that the island is as faction-ridden as Moscow -- and eventually mutates into a squabbling parrot himself. "The only difference between what I was and what I have become is the feathers," he concludes.

Crusoe's fatalism is the hallmark of her generation, says Zara Migranian, a third-year student at MGIMO. "The feeling that there is no longer a golden future in our society, not even one you can escape to, pervades every conversation."

Social despair, according to many observers, is also behind the dramatic increase in religious activity among students. Its chief focus is the Russian Orthodox Church, which has seen unprecedented growth in recent years. Since 1988, the number of Orthodox parishes has jumped from 6,800 to 15,810, and the nation's 42 seminaries and theological schools are flooded with applications.

"What the church offers us," says MGIMO senior and aspiring missionary Vladimir Legoida, "is the inner satisfaction, the peace, that is so absent from our other institutions."

The Orthodox church has long distanced itself from secular affairs. Its priests are forbidden from participating in political activity, and, strictly speaking, Orthodox believers are not supposed to vote.

The allure of ritual-laden Orthodoxy, with its dismissal of politics in favor of mysticism, is also part of a larger revival of Russian tradition among the alienated young. It is their reaction against the crass "New Russia" that sprouted with perestroika -- a Russia that is everything but Russian.

"What we see when we walk around in Moscow nowadays is an ersatz America, an ersatz Germany, an ersatz France and Italy," says MGIMO senior Grigory Falin.

Falin's response is as radical as his analysis. He says he has completely given up television, radio, film and secular literature, and reads only the Orthodox Bible.

"In politics, we have quasi-democracy, and in the economy, we have a quasi-free market," he says. "Nothing except the church is really whole, and nothing else has any roots in our own culture or historical experience."

But religion is not the sole outlet for the rage of young Russia. And as the ear-shattering twang of electric guitars from MGIMO's dormitory windows suggests, withdrawal from popular culture is not in universal effect in the halls of elite academia.

At 19, Migranian is a cultural writer for the Internationalist and several Moscow commercial periodicals. She contends that popular music is in fact the most accurate political barometer among young people in Russia.

"If one of your acquaintances is a 'Red Jacket,' that's enough to know exactly where he stands," she says.

The term refers to a genre of harsh ballads that employ prison slang and are usually concerned with street life and crime. Red Jacket, says Migranian, is the music language of those who are most alienated by the changes in Russia and most cynical about the prospects ahead.

Another, more intellectual strain of music is so-called Russian rock, which focuses on the search for spiritual peace in a chaotic world. There is also a home-bred techno-rap, whose lyrics fall somewhere between the desperation of Red Jacket and the searching of Russian rock.

"Each of these musical trends has its own radio stations, its own clubs and its own dedicated following. People who listen to one sort of music don't listen to another," says Timofei Shewyakoff, 20, chief adviser on younger voters for the Congress of Russian Communities, the leading nationalist political party.

The task for strategists in his and other parties, he says, is to respond to the concerns articulated in this musical culture -- and convert them into campaign themes that will bring the alienated young into the electoral fold.

"This is not simply the first election most of them will be old enough to vote in," he says of the December 17 contest. "It will be the first full-fledged parliamentary election in our country."

Shewyakoff is upbeat about the turmoil that has surrounded the campaign. "It is the noise of a democratic political system maturing, not the noise of democratic self-destruction,'' he insists.

But Migranian is less sure. There are few signs, she says, that faith in a maturing democracy is taking root among students at MGIMO.

In the training ground for Russia's next generation of leaders, according to Migranian, Red Jacket and religion are the rule -- and political engagement is the exception.

"Not long ago, the professor in my 'State Law' course was discussing the parties in the forthcoming election and decided to have a straw poll in our classroom of party affiliation."

To the professor's "profound shock," she says, "not a single one of the 25 students in that room was involved in any way in the campaign."